Quotes About Uncertainty

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account – wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world.

But though the stars were spread across a great reaching blackness, the streets below were bathed in a stale gray dimness which suggested neither night nor day nor any natural phase between them.

Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.

she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source.

just in case you're not around next year: happy birthday.

I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.

Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but, afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia, she cannot find the word for what she fears. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," thinking of herself in the third person.

What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

Still, I wasn't as certain as I tried to sound. And I wondered why it wasn't underputter—you know, for the one who puts them underground. Surely to take them seemed a bit excessive. I mean if they were dead. They wouldn't need the company on the way. Like you would take your sister to the drug store but you would put your bike in the garage. I loved the play of words and the meanings of them.

Laypeople want a definitive answer from the experts, but none can be had because there is not one answer but many, depending on circumstances.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.

Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds. I feel a swelling in my chest, and I honestly don't know if it's pity or jealousy of her belief that God or her dead brother can reach out and affect her life like that. I take her head in my hands and hold her closer, wondering which of us is lost and which is guiding the other someplace new.

The question is there, whther we answer it or not.

There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you—there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.

Clocks will go as they are set, but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.

Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying

There is something in a war carried on by invasion which makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war, because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains be for him, or against him, when her first obtains it.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?†

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

The Bible is the Book of Emancipation of Man. The emancipation of man means his delivery from sorrow and sickness, from poverty, struggle and uncertainty, from ignorance and limitation, and finally from death itself.